Assessment of Severe Apnoea through Voice Analysis, Automatic Speech, and Speaker Recognition Techniques

This study is part of an ongoing collaborative effort between the medical and the signal processing communities to promote research on applying standard Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques for the automatic diagnosis of patients with severe obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Early detection of severe apnoea cases is important so that patients can receive early treatment. Effective ASR-based detection could dramatically cut medical testing time. Working with a carefully designed speech database of healthy and apnoea subjects, we describe an acoustic search for distinctive apnoea voice characteristics. We also study abnormal nasalization in OSA patients by modelling vowels in nasal and nonnasal phonetic contexts using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) pattern recognition on speech spectra. Finally, we present experimental findings regarding the discriminative power of GMMs applied to severe apnoea detection. We have achieved an 81% correct classification rate, which is very promising and underpins the interest in this line of inquiry.

Assisted reproductive technology and obstetric outcome in couples when the male partner has a chronic viral disease.

BACKGROUND Assisted reproductive technology (ART) with washed semen can achieve pregnancy with minimal risk of horizontal and vertical transmission of chronic viral diseases (CVD) such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepati- tis C virus (HCV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) among serodiscordant couples. How- ever, few studies have been made of the use made by these couples of ARTs or of the obstetric results achieved. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this retrospective study, 93 men who were seropositive for HIV, HCV or HBV and who underwent assisted reproduction treatment at our centre (Hospital Universitario Virgen de las Nieves, Granada, Spain) were included. Washed semen was tested to detect viral particles. Non-infected women were tested before and after each treatment, as were the neonates at birth and after three months. RESULTS A total of 62 sperm samples were washed, and none were positive for the detec- tion of viral molecules. Semen samples from 34 HBV positive males were not washed since the female partner had immunity to hepatitis B. In total, 38 clinical pregnancies were achieved (22% per cycle and 40.9% per couple) out of 173 cycles initiated, and 28 births were achieved (16.2% per cycle and 30.1% per couple), producing 34 live births. The rate of multiple pregnancies was 21.4%. Obstetric and neonatal results were similar in the groups of couples studied. At follow-up, no seroconversion was detected in the women or neonates. CONCLUSION Sperm washing and intracytoplasmic sperm injection are shown to be a safe and effective option for reducing the risk of transmission or super infection in serodiscordant or concordant couples who wish to have a child. Pregnancies ob- tained by ART in couples when the male is CVD infected achieve good obstetric and neonatal results.